It's been a long time since this has happened, but I've spent the past eight hours almost obsessing over a show I've just seen, and I feel compelled to share. I went to see Michael Gambon in The Gate Theatre's production of Krapp's Last Tape last night at the Duchess Theatre. I had studied the play in undergrad, but had not seen it live. I also had not read the play since the death of my grandmother, a point I'll return to shortly. I had a very emotional experience in the theatre and need to write about it to really process it all for myself. If that sort of self-reflexivity in art is not your thing, I suggest that you stop reading now. :)
The play deals a lot with memory, and in specific, to the memories (pleasurable and painful) that one accumulates during one's life. Krapp has recorded himself at various points in throughout his life, on audiotape, the details of which are then recording again in a large ledger book. One gets the sense that the young Krapp has, consciously or not, mapped out his life for the old Krapp that we see presented in Beckett's play. A numberof the memories are not remembered by Krapp until he hears them played back to him in his own voice. One particular memory of a woman gives him both pleasure and pain in its initial remeberance and its subsequent repetition.
I couldn't help but think about my grandmother as I watched Gambon's portrayal of an old man, consumed by fragments of his memory, played out of sequence, and in a way that makes little logical sense to an outside viewer. My grandmother spent the last few years of her life in the haze of Alzheimer's and dementia. Especially towards the end of her life, flashes of her memory were made visible to those of us who loved her, and it gave me great pain to watch her at their mercy. Last night I found myself wondering if, metaphorically, her mind was 'organzied' like Krapp's tapes, each memory compartmentalized and spooled, but playing themselves back at random with no internal or external control. I desperately want to hope that, in the midst of all that chaos, my grandmother had a memory that comforted her, like Krapp's memory of his afternoon on a boat with the woman. It made me quite emotional in the theatre, because I could find something painfully recognizable in Krapp's frustration with not being to recall or locate these particular instances.
I'm sure that this isn't Beckett's intention, but I couldn't help but see the character Krapp in this way, recording his one last tape, desperately saving this fragments. As a consequence of this line of thinking, I've been thinking about my grandmother almost constantly all night and this morning. I've been thinking of how clear my memories are of her (and of most things) and my terrbile fear of this loss of clarity. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up, and was extremely lucky to know my grandmother quite well. All of things that I remember best about her, her generosity, her love for my family, her close bond with my mom, are not things manifest in her late life, but rather the memories I have of her pre-Alzheimer's, the things that I carried with me while watching her struggle. I suppose, if this were part of Krapp's story, those memories (like scratching of lottery tickets, and hanging up her bell collection at Chirstmas or her dog eating a whole box of chocolate accidentally, but spitting out the cherries inside) would be the sections of tape that I would play over and over, to drown out the rest.
There's a lot that I could say about this particular production of Krapp's Last Tape. Gambon performance was exquisitely subtle, and very engaging. The design, direction, sound etc. spot on. But I am sure that those will not be things that I remember about those 50 minutes I spent in The Duchess Theatre that year I lived in London. I will remember however feeling like, for a few minutes, I had the chance to be with Nanny Kendi, and the way in which I chose to remember her.
Love you, Nan.
No comments:
Post a Comment